Hack Notes CVA 090714

Eric went shopping at Michael's Art Supply, then Office Depot, then Target, looking for small bags suitable to put our kits into. I found tiny little zip lock bags suitable for the electronics parts, but I didn't find an ideal bag for the whole kit. I bought three kinds: heavy duty zip lock quart size, some "transformers" loot bags, and some blue stripped clear bags used for small gifts. We are going to ask Mitch where he gets his cool orange electronics bags.

I sorted electronics parts the little zip lock bags. We have 14 bags of electronics which contain everything except the ATMEGA (we still need to program it) and the LED (need to order, in mean time can borrow from noisebridge). Then 10 more bags which are additionally lacking the motors. Then 5 more bags which are additionally lacking the shift register (there are some in the blue bin at NB). And we still have 8 PCBs left over. There are also 7 motors - 1 more and we can make a 15th good kit.

Skory and I stuffed the 14 good ekits into the blue stipped bags, along with all the rest. The bags are still lacking:

enclosure (arrives tomorrow)

ribbon cable (Dr Jesus is bringing some)

sticky back velcro (need to buy at sew shop)

small piece of fabric (need to cut!)

page of information (need to make and print)

label sticker (need to make and print) to close bags with.

Skory reports that we are going to get 20 free ("sample") motors from a vendor in China. We are in progress for an order of 200 motors from another vendor (shipping is killer though).

We broke one of the ribbon crimps, but testing another one they seem to be fine - it's hard to crimp, but that's been true of all the crimps. We realized that it will be super important to get the orientation of the ribbon cable correct so that the crimp correctly plugs into the socket on the board without needing any rotation. This will need to be very explicit in the instruction.

We also discovered that the holes in the armature (out which the ribbon cable comes) are in the wrong place for the board being right-side-up in the enclosure. However, rather than having the board upside down, we actually decided that it's better to have the armature upside down (zipper down). This has an additional benefit that the width of the zipper helps fix the angle of the enclosure to vertical. The narrowing of your ankle already makes the top lean out, with the zipper on the top, the enclosure really leans out a lot. Moving the zipper to the bottom helps correct that problem, which is important for proper functioning of the compass. So actually we made this mistake "on purpose" to make ourselves realize the superiority of zipper on the bottom...